No maps for these territories

I am trying to clean up my room. I am going through my papers; a batch of receipts spills out and I begin to tear them up to go in the recycling.

A hundred different pieces of paper, documents of days that I have spent, hours and nights and days. Some have more significance than others; there is $8.19 for a sandwich bought when I was too tired and busy to cook, but there is $12 and change for the Thai lunch that S. and I shared when I was cleaning my things out of the house, heavy times.

There is night after night spent out; there is ATM receipt after ATM receipt, my balance swaying like a walking drunk. There is $69 (!) spent at the Honeyhole in Capitol Hill; of course, I got reimbursed for most all of it; there were five of us there and we made jokes about librarians and talked about whatall I can’t remember, late into the night, bohemia, bohemia. There is a receipt for cards bought at the Library Bookstore in Vancouver; a quaint name, a quaint place, a much needed vacation.

There is a receipt for juice and robotussin at the safeway; god, I felt like I was dying that night. There is another safeway receipt for a pastry brush, flour, and butter; that was the day when Justin and I decided to make puff pastries with spinach.

Good times. Into little bits they go, all of them, filling up a plastic bag with drifts of visible time — my time, my life, is this what it has come to?